because it doesn't matter at all

On Voyager I can't even see avatars or custom usernames

There are avatars?

Even though I tend to comment somewhat frequently, I prefer to be just "another voice in the crowd" I don't really want to be more easily recognized lol

I don't see avatars in my app and I don't really care to. Never had them in early reddit and that's what I'm trying to replicate.

I don't care about mine or anybody elses avatar, also profiles with avatar usually are: selling something (OF) or company profiles or bot accounts, so any account with an avatar is kinda sus to me.

I think many use apps that don't show avatars. I usually browse lemmy with Eternity and sometimes forget they even exist.

Lemmy is a place I prefer to be as anonymous as I can while still participating so I don’t set one for myself and I use voyager the vast majority of the time so I don’t see anyone else’s. I personally don’t find profile pictures/avatars add anything to the experience for me.

Lemmy has avatars?

There are avatars?

In voyager your can’t see avatars. A lot of people use voyager.

Almost every app for Lemmy I have tried does not even have them visible by default and require you to manually turn them on. If their only experience is using an app, they might not even know you can have an avatar.

Why do you bother with an avatar for your Lemmy account?

Because it's stupid and pointless

One of the harsh lessons in software is learning that users sometimes have different wants and expectations than the developer. Gold-plating is a constant temptation, and it usually leads to frustration and resentment.

At the end of the day, if 60-70% of people don't care, either do it for the 30-40%, or do it for your own enjoyment, or put your efforts elsewhere. In any case, don't fall into a pit of resentment just because lots of users are approaching a platform differently than you.

I didn't even know there were user avatars. Most common apps don't show them.

I think this platform is less about people and more about commenting. That's also why we can't even subscribe to people on Lemmy, just communities. So naturally, your profile ends up being less important. And I have close to no incentive to care about avatars. This place is more or less just about the text content and the links. And I don't even want my real face to show up next to my stupid comments.

I mean developers add avatar to all kinds of things, whether that's useful or not. I myself don't need one in Spotify or the fitness tracker app or my computer user account. They're there nonetheless, and once you implement them, you have to deal with the UX representation. I think some users like to customize stuff so it get's implemented. But it might be meaningless to most of us.

Neither the apps I've used or the web-end I use on my PC seems to make use of avatars at all.

I'd set one if there was a point, but there isn't.

I would first need a personality to express.

For something like Lemmy or Reddit, any posts or conversations that I have are generally going out to random people who also happen to want to engage in a particular discussion. I don't even look at usernames. The next conversation that I have will likely be with completely different people. In other words, there is no sense of community (unless I were to become heavily invested in a single community for some reason), and therefore I have no reason to want to make myself stand out in any way or make it easier for people to recognize me.

On the other hand, for something like an old school forum that I would frequently post on, or a discord server or something, I might actually get to know people and develop a sense of community. In that type of situation, I feel like an avatar can be appropriate.

Because I dont care.

I don't see them on the third party app i use

As a UI developer, that’s always been a gripe because I put a lot of effort into making them look good and scale properly, etc. When I see 60-70% or more accounts sporting the default avatar, it makes me wonder why I even bother.

You could just do those autogenerated things instead of a static image if they haven't set one. Like, hash their username and use the bits of the hash as an input to some function that procedurally-generates an image. Makes it easy to visually-identify users without needing them to go out and manually create an avatar.

I don't really care much about the visual appearance myself, but I did want something unique to make it easier to visually-identify my posts for other users. Humans can identify color in their visual field in constant time, so having different colors for different users is helpful. I plonked "wave swirl"---the first thing that came to mind---or something like that into Stable Diffusion 1.5, got a picture of a wave, haven't touched it since.

EDIT: For a good example, I always easily identify @Kolanaki@yiffit.net comments, as he's got custom colored Unicode in a display name and a custom avatar and custom background. I don't care enough to go do that myself, but it does highlight the fact that it can be useful for rapidly-identifying people in a conversation.

For those who can't see avatars, he looks like this in the Lemmy Web UI:

I'll add that I don't personally really like the display name functionality, because I need to refer to people in text using "@" syntax---as I did above---by their real username and it makes it slightly more obnoxious to get that, but I do have to say that it does help make users visually unique.

I think that my ideal for user identification would be maybe some sort of procedurally-generated flag as the default. Those are designed to be readily-identifiable at a distance already. Like, use the hash bits to choose one of several different groups of flags (triband, etc) and bits to choose the color of various elements in the flag. If one flag isn't enough to consume all the bits in the hash, maybe do two side-by-side, etc.

EDIT2: Hmm. Now I kind of wonder if that should be done client-side, because it could let the viewing user theme what they're seeing. Like, dark-mode people don't have to have bright flags, if someone wants a specific theme they could use that (a string of different colored cats in different poses), etc.

EDIT3: And I loathe the fact that the Lemmy Web UI by default permits animated avatars. I think I disabled animations somewhere in Firefox specifically because of the people on here using animated avatars. I think that not putting the kibosh on that was a huge mistake.

I can't imagine any scenario which I'd want to use one.

Would block avatars if I could, don't want to see people's vanity, just the words.

Hadn’t really thought about it until you asked. Don’t see why it’s worth the bother.

Can't be arsed.

I'm not sure how to, and it's not something I care about enough to figure out how. I generally think of posting here as more shouting into the void, so I don't care very much to personalize my account.

I use Sync. I may be missing out on the perfectly simple UI that was developed to do this.

Wonder the same thing a lot. I change mine up semi-regularly, same with my profile banner, but that's just me being bored.

The thing that drives me insane is when a community doesn't use the icon. The FUCK ARE YOU DOING.